dcollins
November 13th, 2009, 05:03 PM
What goes around comes around, and I'm finally paying for a misspent youth at the hands of Karmic Koala. It is likely I will be doing a fresh install soon and this got me thinking about configuration file management.
Ideally, my data and configuration files would be completely separate to facilitate upgrades. However, many applications put user-configuration files in $HOME right alongside my data. In addition, I have several configuration customizations in /etc/. This poses a challenge at upgrade time, as blindly backing up and restoring these directories often leads to mismatches between the configuration files and apps.
Some solutions I am weighing involve using a CMS to track changes to my configuration files (probably more trouble than it's worth), auto-generating patches of changes made to configuration files, or possibly putting my data in some place other than $HOME and just linking to it. No matter what I think of, I'm left hand-editing configuration files as part of each update/install.
Certainly I am not the only person to confront these issues. Does anyone have some sage advice on how to correctly handle configuration customizations during upgrades? Thanks.
Ideally, my data and configuration files would be completely separate to facilitate upgrades. However, many applications put user-configuration files in $HOME right alongside my data. In addition, I have several configuration customizations in /etc/. This poses a challenge at upgrade time, as blindly backing up and restoring these directories often leads to mismatches between the configuration files and apps.
Some solutions I am weighing involve using a CMS to track changes to my configuration files (probably more trouble than it's worth), auto-generating patches of changes made to configuration files, or possibly putting my data in some place other than $HOME and just linking to it. No matter what I think of, I'm left hand-editing configuration files as part of each update/install.
Certainly I am not the only person to confront these issues. Does anyone have some sage advice on how to correctly handle configuration customizations during upgrades? Thanks.